


with no thought of mercy

by skyward_bloom



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26582332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyward_bloom/pseuds/skyward_bloom
Summary: Akechi thinks that if the god Baldr hadn’t wanted to die, he shouldn’t have been so perfect. Flawlessness demands to be unraveled, dares people like Akechi to try.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 51





	with no thought of mercy

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from the prose edda.

Regret is a foreign thing, a mystery. Akechi doesn’t know that he’s ever felt it in earnest, beyond small grievances like straying from his usual order at a café and wishing later that he hadn’t. There are larger things in life he would have preferred not to happen, yes, but the memories of them are blanketed in layers of resentment, the mountain of it all steadily growing with each person who wrongs him. Past that, he just does what he does and lives with it, never looking back. There are no other options now. Or none that he can afford.

So that’s not what he’s feeling as he sits in the shower, legs tucked against his chest, water cascading all lukewarm over him. Not regret, because if he turned back time he wouldn’t do it any differently. He would still pick up that gun, would still fire it, would still curl Amamiya’s limp hand around it afterward and then walk out the door. It had to be done. Akechi had to do it.

Another layer of resentment, then: He hates Amamiya Ren for making Akechi kill him.

The spray of the showerhead is weak, like a feeble drizzle of rain that could peter out at any moment. It doesn’t feel like much of anything. Akechi sits under it, stares at a crack in the tiled wall, thinks about that idiot Amamiya smiling at him. An infuriating smile. He’d worn it even when Akechi swore to defeat him, tiny and secret and coy, like he was pleased to earn Akechi’s enmity. There had been no smile when he stared down the barrel of a silenced pistol.

Remembering the silent terror in Amamiya’s bloodshot grey eyes, the way his battered face paled, Akechi digs fingernails into his arms until it stings and he feels light bruising start to bloom on his flesh. At the time, he hadn’t paused or hesitated, hadn’t felt anything but the thrum of furious adrenaline beating through him, urging him forward. It was over in a single instant. It’s only in hindsight that it seems the moment stretched on for so long, and the details start to eat at him.

He thinks, even though it isn’t true at all, that Amamiya feels like the first person he’s ever murdered. The first human, real and true and corporeal. Not a shadow. Not some abstraction that hardly looks like a person at all. Not even the nameless guard he’d taken down only a moment before. The first person to look at him with real, pleading fear and then die for his lack of mercy. And the thought hits him now like a jolt, unbidden, unwanted, leaving Akechi scrambling to force it back down. He gets shakily to his feet and turns off the water, pretending he isn’t breathing as hard as he is. Turns to the wall and rests his forehead against damp tile and feels his breaths all echoed back at him. Remembers that unbearable smile.

“As rivals?” Amamiya had said over the phone once, voice carrying the teasing note of a grin.

Akechi had given one of his artificial laughs, polite and exact and false, said, “Whatever works for you,” and then continued, too honestly, “As long as I can spend some time with you, think of it as you please.” He’d hurried to end the call after that, feeling strange.

He feels strange now, too, but differently so. He swallows with difficulty and clenches his teeth as the wet thud of Amamiya’s bloodied head falling on the table plays in his mind over and over. Remembers his own deranged seething, the way he gave one last hostile grin, fired one bullet into the imaginary bullseye on Amamiya’s brow. Finishing their game with a perfect zero. Black hat.

He doesn’t regret it. He would do it again. But he thinks back and realizes the voice he can remember, goading Amamiya in his final moments, is not his own; it’s Shido’s threatening, violent hiss, furious and cold and unhinged.

That’s what has him retching miserably into the open toilet. That and nothing else. He would do it all again, he tells himself. Amamiya gave him no other choice.

“It’s a little funny, Akechi-kun,” says Okumura, her voice as soft and delicate as it is saccharine. She talks the way a porcelain doll would if it had a voice. Every time she speaks, Akechi thinks of the pathetic shadow of her father keeling over in his crumbling palace. She says, “Your Persona is Robin Hood, but you don’t agree with the practices of righteous thieves.”

“It does seem kinda hypocritical,” Takamaki pipes up, looking back to shoot Akechi a sort of apologetic smile. She’s dense, but not as much of a bother as the others. Not irredeemably idiotic like Sakamoto, or prim and stuffy like Niijima, or utterly useless like that horrific cat.

They’re in the cat bus now, crammed into the narrow rows of seating as they totter through Mementos. Akechi is wedged between Kitagawa and a door, squeezed in so tightly he barely has room to fish his phone from his pocket. The boy beside him has a lingering smell of paint thinner and beansprouts about him.

“Yes, well,” says Akechi, then stops. He hurries to estimate exactly how courteous his response should be, how bashful. He settles on diplomatic condescension. “We just have different ideas of what sort of righteous thievery is permissible, I suppose.”

“So redistribution of wealth is fine,” Niijima says dryly, “but you draw the line at making criminals develop a conscience?” She isn’t within his sightline, so he can’t know for sure, but he can almost sense her wince at her own words. _Criminals_ , she said. And here they are between infiltrations of her own sister’s twisted psyche. A beautiful sort of Freudian slip.

He injects the blandest smile into his reply as he says, “We all have to draw our line somewhere, Niijima-san.”

From the driver’s seat, Amamiya says, “You know, I think mine’s a good fit.”

“Do you?” says Akechi, politely disinterested.

“Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief mistaken for a villain,” says Okumura. She giggles daintily. “Yes, it really suits you, Ren-kun.”

“Not just that,” says Amamiya. “You know, Lupin eventually becomes the rival of a famous detective and beats him at his own game. Sound familiar?”

A tense pause falls over the car. No one says anything, and they don’t look at Akechi, but he can feel them waiting for his response. Akechi wavers between a frown and his fixed, well-mannered smile. If it were only the two of them, he would glare dubiously at the back of Amamiya’s head. Between them, it’s no longer a secret that Akechi despises him, but it’s still a deferential animosity for now. He can’t afford to lash out this close to their end goal.

Before Akechi can settle on a reply, Amamiya turns his head back and grins at Akechi, slightly devious. _I definitely wouldn’t lose,_ he’d told Akechi before, assured and defiant and insufferable. As if he has a choice in the matter. As if the path they’re barreling down now will lead to anything but his wretched, deserved end.

In return, Akechi offers another false smile, burying his irritation deep inside him for now. “Not particularly,” he says, throwing in a chuckle for good measure. “Unless you’ve been working with the police and solving cases behind my back.”

“Not yet,” says Amamiya, now facing forward again. His tone is airy and casual. “But after the Phantom Thieves disband, maybe I’ll consider the career change.”

“I look forward to it,” says Akechi, full of well-repressed spite.

Then the tension in the car abates, and everyone goes back to normal, chattering away and complaining about inconsequential things. (When he looks back on this moment so many weeks later, in the middle of making a sad dinner for himself, Akechi will realize the source of it: that they all thought Amamiya had given them away, shown his hand too early. At the time he’d pegged it as a general sort of awkwardness, the type that springs up when a friend or colleague says something tactless and everyone holds their breath as they await the inevitable fallout. He was still an unknown quantity to them at the time, after all, or so he’d thought; an outsider who’d merged into their group like oil in so much water. Of course they would be afraid of him taking offense. He overcooks his instant noodles, leaving them soggy, and dumps the whole thing in the trash.)

The 20th of November fades into the 21st, and Akechi, lying awake on his too-soft mattress with hair still damp from that short millennium spent in the shower, thinks about that passing comment from Okumura. He wonders what she would have said if she had known the truth then, if she saw what the gruesome insides of him really looked like. He pictures her giving one of her little foolish laughs—the laugh of someone who’s been waited on hand and foot their whole life, who’s never known hunger, who can spring back from the loss of a miserable parent and act bright and chipper and unaffected, just because they’ve managed through force of naïve will and the divine power of friendship to drive back their sadness—with her eyes on Loki’s tense, looming form. Pictures her saying _It’s funny, Akechi-kun, that your Persona is named for someone who was fathered by a monster._ Hates her, but in a separate way from how he hates—hated—Amamiya, a pure and uncomplicated way. She represents so much of what he's never had. Stability. Composure. A dead father. The list goes on.

But Loki does suit him: a monstrosity who sowed chaos wherever he went, who never belonged much of anywhere, whose very nature was to lie, hurt, ruin. The myths say, too, that Loki tore apart the world by killing a man who was perfect, beloved by all. And the gods were shaken by the loss, enraged, consumed, realizing his death heralded the beginning of the end. It only seems fair, though. Akechi thinks that if the god Baldr hadn’t wanted to die, he shouldn’t have been so perfect. Flawlessness demands to be unraveled, dares people like Akechi to try.

So he did, and here he is.

(He doesn’t regret it. There was no other option. He tells himself that until it feels true, and the memory of dinner plate eyes and gentle rivulets of blood is nothing but a neutral fact to acknowledge and then tuck neatly away. There’s more to do. He doesn’t have time to dwell on something that can’t be changed, that was always going to end up like this anyway.)

“I’ll hold on to your glove,” says Amamiya, his voice muted and dull behind the bulkhead door.

As Akechi starts to cave in on himself, ragged and weak and gasping, he realizes—maybe absurdly—that if he had his own Palace, the treasure inside of it would be that fucking glove. It’s too late for him to put a name to what his distortion would be, to what it was all this time, and he doesn’t have the energy to articulate it regardless. He just has this twisted version of himself staring him down with venomous contempt. The cognition, he thinks, doesn’t look much like him at all. But maybe it looks like what he was going to become, what he would have been if not for this moment. Maybe he should be thankful to have the opportunity to die instead.

He hears Amamiya’s friends shouting for him, desperate, and the smallest voice in his head tells him they don’t want another black mark on their record for saving people. And that might be true, to a degree, because god knows they don’t give a shit about Akechi himself. But if these are going to be his final moments, he can let himself believe, just for a second, that they care.

The last thing he’s aware of is pulling a trigger. After that: nothing.

He doesn’t mean to spill his guts about his childhood, his mom, the loneliness of the rundown old bathhouse he went to as a kid, but it happens nevertheless. Amamiya brings it out in him. He finds himself wanting to share all sorts of dangerous things—not Shido dangerous, of course not, but the sorts of tiny secrets that have been hidden away for so long he thought he’d lost the language to give voice to them at all. It would have been easier if he had. All this level of honesty does is complicate things, make him look weak and pitiful. But he keeps talking, and Amamiya just listens, quiet and too understanding, his bare, unobstructed gaze frightening somehow.

When they get out of the bath and amble to the locker room in their towels, Amamiya’s face is apple-red. They talk more and his eyes keep wandering to a point over Akechi’s shoulder, or the top of his head, cheeks still burning all the while. Akechi gives him an out, attributing it to the heat, and the other boy’s embarrassment is that much more pronounced as he nods. They race to get dressed, both pretending they’re not looking, pretending they don’t notice each other looking either, and Akechi feels an inexplicable tightness in his chest that he doesn’t have a word for.

After, Amamiya says Akechi can call him Ren, because that’s his name and they’re friends, supposedly. Akechi tries it out, and Amamiya’s gone sort of pink all over again. Akechi doesn’t extend the same offer, because he doesn’t have to, and no one’s called him Goro in years now. No reason for them to start. If it bothers Amamiya at all, he doesn’t give any indication of it; just looks faintly pleased at Akechi’s acceptance of this newfound familiarity.

Akechi calls him out of impulse once he gets home, like he usually does after their outings. The bath has left him feeling loose and aimless and a bit stupid, his limbs and brain all jelly. He rambles until he realizes he shouldn’t anymore, and with that realization comes a hot spike of dread. He makes himself laugh and says, “Ah, now I’m veering into strange territory,” and ends the conversation before he can spend even a second longer musing on the ways Amamiya Ren fascinates him.

The next morning, he gets a text that reads, _Hey, I forgot to say this before but I’m glad you opened up. I like getting to know who the real Akechi Goro is._ Which is laughable, because nothing about what Amamiya’s seen of him is real. Objective facts about his shitty life don’t add up to anything concrete. There would be no thank-yous if the real Akechi reared his ugly head.

He replies, _Perhaps next time we can switch. As I’ve said, you’re quite the mystery. Haha._

 _Really? I think I’m embarrassingly transparent,_ says Amamiya.

And that’s not untrue. But the more Akechi learns about him and what he’s capable of, and experiences his almost hypnotic way of coaxing intimate secrets out of people firsthand, the less sense everything about him makes. Akechi, who isn’t a real detective but isn’t stupid, either, has no patience for mysteries, least of all ones like this.

 _Well, a little more transparency couldn’t hurt,_ Akechi replies, even though it very much could.

There are a lot of ways for cheeks to go red, Akechi thinks, watching the blood cascade softly for one lengthy second.

(He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t. He doesn’t he doesn’t he—)

“That son of a bitch,” Akechi breathes incredulously, gripping the edges of the counter in the studio restroom. Sae and the phone. Of course. Of _course_.

It wasn’t enough that that clown had to best Akechi at everything else, no; he had to outclass him here, too, render him irrelevant. Because what good is a killer who can’t kill properly? What use is a detective who’s so easily outmaneuvered by a thief?

(One death and un-death later, it will occur to Akechi just how unfair it is that the one thing he can do better than Amamiya is die. But maybe there’s some poetry in that, a cruel irony. A murderer can’t be choosy about these things, he supposes.)

Yoshizawa, awkward in her own skin, says to Amamiya in a too-loud murmur, “Would you say this is how he normally is? Like a, ah… ruthless sort of person?”

“Just everyday Akechi,” says Amamiya, riddled with amused exasperation.

Akechi looks back at the two of them, at their scarlet gloves and flowing black coats and ridiculous sleeves, and he realizes Yoshizawa’s image of rebellion is that of a girl who’s taken her knight in shining armor and melded him into her own personal fairytale, a mockery of her own savior. He has to stop himself from physically recoiling.

Except the story of Cendrillon is that her enchantment will end at midnight, after which her dreams turn to pumpkins and she returns to being the lowly scullery maid, unloved, imperfect. Akechi decides he pities her. Even her inner rebellion is just a sad lie dreamt up by a fanciful girl.

Does he feel guilty for that assessment later, when her resolve crumbles and she’s just a frightened child who’s lost the only person she felt she could rely on? The tiniest bit, sure. Just because he’s an abomination doesn’t mean he’s heartless. It’s not for lack of trying, either; to persist in cruelty after spending so much time with Amamiya is an almost herculean feat. Ultimately Akechi didn’t prove strong enough for it. Or he grew wary of brutality the way a child of an alcoholic is wary of drink. Villainy is made difficult when the epitome of everything you hate is a villain himself.

Outside the Palace, the winter air is thick, metal-tasting. Amamiya adjusts his fake glasses, gazing up at the half-there stadium with a frown.

“I’m worried about Sumire,” he admits, even though it didn’t need saying. He worries about everyone. It’s a chronic condition at this point. But he accepts it when Akechi explains their need for information, strategy, _something._ Nods silently and says nothing when Akechi turns on his heel and walks away.

Their phone call that night is all business. Akechi doesn’t admit to anything he wishes he hadn’t, and Amamiya gives his usual laconic replies. It’s only out of habit that Akechi tacks on an almost friendly _good night_ at the end of the conversation, of course. Things aren’t the way they were in the autumn. He doesn’t have to keep up the charade of geniality anymore. It’s just instinct.

He lies down on a mattress that smells dusty even with freshly-washed sheets, and his thoughts wander to Amamiya. Wonders if he still has that glove. Decides quickly that it doesn’t matter either way.

Akechi is going to die.

That isn’t technically the truth of it. He’s going to go back to what he was before this, to be unmade. It isn’t dying if you aren’t really alive to begin with. Surely there’s a rule about that somewhere, a precedent.

After the empty nothing he fell into on the ship, he was awake and alive again and in Shibuya, of all the ungodly places, wearing his usual uniform that was too light for the weather, yet still didn’t leave him freezing. He had a feeling he needed to be somewhere. The barest dusting of snow sprinkled down as he took step after mechanical step toward some unknown destination, and then he saw Sae and a mop of scruffy hair that could only be Amamiya and he _knew_. His legs carried him faster, and he paused just within earshot, listening.

When he made his presence known, Amamiya had gaped, stuttering, “But… how?” Akechi’s never known him to be the most eloquent, but had never seen him at a loss for words before. At the time Akechi called that shock _satisfying_ but knew that wasn’t the word for the sort of pleased feeling bubbling up inside him.

Does Akechi regret his one selfless action, his moment of self-sacrifice that let the Phantom Thieves escape? No. In his ugly heart, he knows it was the right choice—the _only_ choice. And he deserved it, anyway, for everything he’s done. He’s not a good enough person to make amends and doesn’t think he could ever be, but maybe dying will make up for that.

Robin Hood might have been a lie, but he can still do one recklessly good thing.

(But does he regret pulling the trigger, believing the boy in front of him would die and the last thing he saw would be Akechi’s inhuman snarl? Does he regret how easy the action was, or how quickly he accepted it, or how vicious his resentment grew when he found out the dead boy wasn’t dead at all? Does he regret the times he asked Amamiya to join him at the café, the arcade, the billiards lounge, the jazz club, even though there was no reason, no justification for any of it? He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to. And maybe there’s no point. What would he even change? Selfishly, fearfully, he thinks nothing.)

He emerges from the sea of nothing, again in Shibuya. None of the others are in sight; he’s surrounded by endless waves of strangers, and none of them have spotted him, or know who he is, or care. He retreats to his apartment, his bed that smells like dust. There are nearly two months of cobwebs in the corners, like he hasn’t been sleeping here every night. Maybe he hasn’t.

As he stares up at the ceiling, he wonders in passing who’s been paying the rent all this time: a dead man or a condemned one.

He calls in to have his phone disconnected, then sets to work making himself disappear.

In hindsight, the smirk on Amamiya’s face when he mussed Akechi’s hair and put those glasses on him may not have been smug at all. Akechi thinks he knew that even then. If he’d really found Amamiya insufferable he wouldn’t have sat with him and ordered one cup of coffee after another, or made that absurd comment about dressing Amamiya in his clothes just to hear that breath of a chuckle. If he’d really and truly resented Amamiya by then, Akechi wouldn’t have spent the next few weeks mulling anxiously over whether or not to message him again, only to settle on inviting him somewhere special and private and _his_. He wouldn’t have felt a prickle of trepidation all down his spine as he said, “I’m hoping you’ll like it too,” as if something like that mattered.

There are a lot of things about Amamiya Ren that Akechi thinks he’s known for a long time, and a lot of things about himself as well, but pretended otherwise for the sake of convenience. The not-glances at the bathhouse; the warm and teasing “Honey, I’m home” that Amamiya let out whenever he found Akechi at Leblanc; the ventures to intimate locales that wouldn’t make sense as places to bring an up-and-coming nemesis.

“Under different circumstances,” Akechi remembers saying, “we could have been great rivals… or perhaps even friends.” He doesn’t think he imagined the hurt and disappointment pulling at Amamiya’s features then. They were already both of those things, one more so than the other, hidden under so many layers of prideful pretense.

Irrationally, he thinks about the glove. In his imaginary Palace, he has all the words now for what that distorted cognition would be, and it doesn’t even matter.

There’s more room inside the cat bus now. It’s grown an extra row of seats, so there are no longer arguments about people having to sit on each other or stretch across the floor. But the leg room is negligible, and no number of rest stops can make Akechi feel any less stiff.

On either side of him are Takamaki and Kitagawa, the only ones willing to sit beside him while Amamiya’s driving. The others are all too afraid, or too disdainful, or generally too fragile, in Yoshizawa’s case. They’ll make friendly conversation, aid him in battle, but sitting beside him, close enough to touch? It’s an impossibility. He’s the monster under their bed, a wild dog too dangerous to approach. Maybe they think his brokenness is contagious.

Right now, the silence permeating the still-cramped car is awkward, strained. Akechi had tried to thank them—well, thank Amamiya—for keeping their promise about Shido, and Sakamoto had been all too quick to shut him down. Akechi doesn’t care about things like that, isn’t here to make friends or win people over, but Amamiya had said, “Out of line, Ryuji,” leading Sakamoto to sputter indignantly.

“I ain’t gonna apologize,” Sakamoto had insisted.

“And I don’t expect you to,” said Akechi, because he’s never cared what Sakamoto thinks and isn’t about to start.

“Well, good,” said Sakamoto, “’cause I won’t.”

“Boys,” Takamaki muttered under her breath.

Amamiya just replied, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Did you flunk out of kindergarten or something?”

“Tell that to _him_ ,” said Sakamoto through gritted teeth.

“Ryuji.” Not quite stern, but disappointed.

“Yeah, yeah. Fine.” And Sakamoto went quiet, not, apparently, having anything nice to say at all.

Then, after a pause, Amamiya had glanced back at Akechi. “Anyway, it was no problem,” he said. “We already had business with him.”

“Of course,” said Akechi, then looked away, stomach suddenly in knots.

Now no one’s saying anything, doing anything, because they’re probably in the same boat as Sakamoto and don’t have any generosity to offer. And again, Akechi doesn’t _care_ , just made the gesture of thanks because he felt obligated to, but to the rest of them, kindness does matter. A lack thereof matters, too. Maybe they’re at war with their undying need to placate everyone they ever meet and their personal resentment of Akechi.

Kitagawa, who still smells of beansprouts and paint and maybe the steel-like fragrance of winter, looks to Akechi now from behind that kitsune mask, drawing his eye. It’s a gaze full of blank intensity, no clear emotion behind it but still disarming all the same. Then Kitagawa nods, turns back away, and the moment is over. Akechi has no idea what just passed between them, but supposes it was significant in some way. Or would be, if he could give a shit.

“This isn’t _trivial_ ,” Amamiya spits, looking, for the first time Akechi’s seen, really and truly furious, his body tense and entire expression pulled into a livid frown. He looks like he could punch him. Akechi would like to see him try.

It is trivial, though, this matter of Akechi’s non-life, his future that would never be, and wouldn’t be worth anything even if it could. Any faint hope he’d had of making something of himself was crushed the moment Maruki dangled the false possibility in front of him. But he can do this, at least. He can die and _that_ can matter, _that_ can be good and worthwhile.

He gives Amamiya his refusal, and still Amamiya has the nerve to look fraught, his eyes a sort of angry red as he keeps frowning at Akechi. They don’t have the luxury of entertaining other options. Akechi doesn’t know what the point is of wasting energy feeling bad about something they can’t even change. There is no reality where Akechi can live freely, and that’s just something Amamiya will have to accept.

Eventually, Amamiya mumbles to the floor, “We’re stopping Maruki.” The words come out reluctant and sad. He doesn’t want to do this, but will. Because Akechi won’t take the alternative. Because Amamiya cares about what Akechi wants and feels. Cares enough that he’ll give up what _he_ wants for it, when his only wish in this warped reality had been for Akechi to come back. And that’s—something.

A peculiar feeling twists warmly in Akechi’s insides, changes him. The chaos roiling in all his being gives way to something else: the essence of resistance. Not a thing that lives only to spite, but a rebel standing against conquest. Loki is still somewhere underneath it all, in his deepest darkness, but there’s no room for him at the very forefront of whatever the remains of Akechi’s heart are now. This new, rebellious thing in him is called Hereward, and he demands to be known.

When Akechi comes back to himself, he says to Amamiya, “What’s a life worth in a reality that was cooked up just to satisfy someone else? I say none.” But he can’t look at him as he says it. Better to keep it neutral, impersonal. No sense in twisting the knife.

He’s leaving and Amamiya starts to say something just behind him, but the words don’t come out in time. Akechi’s already gone, the warm air and rich coffee-and-curry aroma quickly disappearing. But even in the snow, it’s never truly cold in Maruki’s world. Never unpleasant.

(With that change inside him comes a new awakening, too, to a different truth than before: There would have been no Palace, no distortion. The glove was always what he thought it was. The thought sits miserably in his gut, unrelenting.)

It’s a Sunday evening, one of the busier nights of the week at Jazz Jin. This is the third time Amamiya’s dragged Akechi here, and Akechi still doesn’t get why. It usually follows an afternoon spent in Mementos. They’ll part for a couple of hours, then Akechi inevitably gets a call asking him to come to Kichijoji. This time Amamiya pulls him along to Harmony Alley to treat him to steamed buns first, as if sensing that Akechi hasn’t eaten dinner.

“Are we not going to address the proverbial elephant in the room?” asks Akechi, swirling his straw idly through his drink. It’s fruity and colorful and has an almost impossible number of fruit garnishes, but it’s good, like everything they serve here, so he won’t complain about its gaudiness.

“Hm?” Amamiya looks up from his own drink, distracted. He’s been tapping his foot absently to the music filtering through the speakers. “What do you mean?”

“Our history,” says Akechi. “In case you’ve forgotten, I did try more than once to kill you.”

“Oh,” says Amamiya. “Yeah, I guess you did.”

“And?”

Amamiya shrugs. “Don’t do it again?”

Akechi doesn’t know what he expected. “Have the dozen Personas that you have with you addled your brain?” he asks.

“Maybe,” says Amamiya. “I’m incredibly stupid.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Akechi says dryly.

Amamiya just beams at him, eyes crinkling happily, like having Akechi insult him is one of the greatest joys possible. Then he sobers, saying, “Hey, about what Ryuji said.”

“It’s not important,” says Akechi.

“No, but it is.” Amamiya scoots his chair closer to the table, closer to Akechi, and it squeaks disruptively in protest. His eyes are earnest and his hair is fluffy and ridiculous. “Even if the others didn’t care about avenging you, I did. I just… want you to know that.”

They don’t say anything for a moment, either of them. The piano and saxophone make up a carelessly pleasant tune, meandering and gentle and idyllic and thoughtless. There are droplets lingering on Amamiya’s glasses still from the snow. And looking at him, Akechi feels strange again, incomprehensible.

“Well, thank you,” says Akechi.

“You’re welcome, Goro,” says Ren, smile all soft mischief.

“The relationship you two share is very unusual,” Akechi hears Maruki say on the other side of the windowed old wall.

Yes, thinks Akechi. Yes it is.

Ren is staring sullenly at nothing. Goro looks away quickly and keeps walking down the station platform. A light breeze tickles his skin sadly. When the train departs, he manages not to glance back at it, even though he thinks he was supposed to. Inside him, for the first time in months, Loki stirs, waits.

**Author's Note:**

> started this with the thought "my son deserves to be happy" and then proceeded to write 5k of him mostly being miserable. idk i have no excuses


End file.
